The Golden Bowl, Volume I by Henry James (page 5)

had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.

“It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need–it’s only THAT that makes me wonder. It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.”

Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. “You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added: “What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man’s in a position in which he has nothing in life to do.”

Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband’s company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him. “He has behaved beautifully–he did from the first. I’ve thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve had a chance, told him so. Therefore, therefore–!” But it died away as she mused.

“Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?”

“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart. It’s a question of their doing as they should when together–which is another matter.”

“And how do you think then,” the Colonel asked with interest, “that, when together, they SHOULD do? The less they do, one would say, the better–if you see so much in it.”

His wife, at this, appeared to hear him. “I don’t see in it what YOU’D see. And don’t, my dear,” she further answered, “think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They’re the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in right.”

“I’m surely never horrid or low,” he returned, “about anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends–as I see them myself: what I can’t do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up–!” But he exhaled it again in smoke.

“My additions don’t matter when you’ve not to pay the bill.” With which her meditation again bore her through the air. “The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn’t afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was–if I hadn’t seen he wasn’t–so,” said Mrs. Assingham, “could I. So,” she declared, “WOULD I. It’s perfectly true,” she went on–“it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted. And I LIKED his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn’t have faced it. Then, if SHE had not had confidence, we might have talked. But she had it to any amount.”

“Did you ask her how much?” Bob Assingham patiently inquired.

He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the sharpest spring of response. “Never, never–it wasn’t a time to ‘ask.’ Asking is suggesting–and it wasn’t a time to suggest. One had to make up one’s mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as–for so proud a creature– almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due.”

“That is to Mrs. Assingham?”

She said nothing for a little–there were, after all, alternatives. “Maggie herself of course–astonishing little Maggie.”

“Is Maggie then astonishing too?”–and he gloomed out of his window.

His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. “I’m not sure that I don’t begin to see more in her than– dear little person as I’ve always thought–I ever supposed there was. I’m not sure that, putting a good many things together, I’m not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary.”

“You certainly will if you can,” the Colonel resignedly remarked.

Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out. “In fact–I do begin to feel it–Maggie’s the great comfort. I’m getting hold of it. It will be SHE who’ll see us through. In fact she’ll have to. And she’ll be able.”

Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband’s general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr. Verver. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!”

“If she is, however,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “she’ll be extraordinary enough–and that’s what I’m thinking of. But I’m not indeed so very sure,” she added, “of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I mean I’m not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife.”

“I shouldn’t think you would be, love,” the Colonel with some promptness responded. “Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist–!” His cigar, in short, once more, could alone express it.

“Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?”–this memory, for the full view, Fanny found herself also invoking.

It made her companion, in truth, slightly gape. “An incredible little idealist–Charlotte herself?”

“And she was sincere,” his wife simply proceeded “she was unmistakably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it.”

“And that–I see–happens to be another of the questions you can’t ask her. You have to do it all,” said Bob Assingham, “as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up–though who’s to come down on you if you break them I don’t quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses–like forfeits on Christmas eve?” To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her, he further added: “How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?”

“I shall go on,” Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, “while there’s a scrap as big as your nail. But we’re not yet, luckily, reduced only to that.” She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver’s obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. “even if her debt was not to the others–even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight. For what, really, did the Prince do,” she asked herself, “but generously trust her? What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong? That creates for her, upon my word,” Mrs. Assingham pursued, “a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which –well, which she’ll be really a fiend if she doesn’t make the law of her conduct. I mean of course his trust that she wouldn’t interfere with him–expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time.”

The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel’s next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united, for the most part, but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best, his note. He at present, however, actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps. He literally asked, in short, an intelligent, well nigh a sympathising, question. “Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel–that, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?”

“Taking it in the right way.” Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.

“But doesn’t it rather depend on what she may most feel to BE the right way?”

“No–it depends on nothing. Because there’s only one way–for duty or delicacy.”

“Oh–delicacy!” Bob Assingham rather crudely murmured.

“I mean the highest kind–moral. Charlotte’s perfectly capable of appreciating that. By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone.”

“Then you’ve made up your mind it’s all poor Charlotte?” he asked with an effect of abruptness.

The effect, whether intended or not, reached her–brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which, somehow, the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort. “Then you’ve made up yours differently? It really struck you that there IS something?”

The movement itself, apparently, made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question. “Perhaps that’s just what she’s doing: showing him how much she’s letting him alone–pointing it out to him from day to day.”

“Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair- case in the manner you described to me?”

“I really, my dear, described to you a manner?” the Colonel, clearly, from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.

“Yes–for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn’t tell me very much–THAT you couldn’t for your life; but I saw for myself that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it.” She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion–confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even HE, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of it would escape–she should have it at hand for reference. “Come, my dear–you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you couldn’t resist thinking. I don’t ask more of it than that. And your idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine–so that you can’t pretend, as usual, that mine has run away with me. I haven’t caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see,” she concluded, “where you are, and I’m much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point de repere outside myself–which is where I like it. Now I can work round you.”

Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key, so that their household had gone to bed; and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob Assingham waited–conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn’t turn his face, but he stared straight before him, and his wife had already perceived in the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire– proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. “Leave it,” he at last remarked, “to THEM.”

“‘Leave’ it–?” She wondered.

“Let them alone. They’ll manage.”

“They’ll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah, there then you are!”

“They’ll manage in their own way,” the Colonel almost cryptically repeated.

It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband’s indurated conscience, it gave her, full in her face, the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful truly, then, the evocation. “So cleverly–THAT’S your idea?–that no one will be the wiser? It’s your idea that we shall have done all that’s required of us if we simply protect them?”

The Colonel, still in his place, declined, however, to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one’s way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, none the less, he had his point to make–for which he took another instant. But he made it, for the third time, in the same fashion. “They’ll manage in their own way.” With which he got out.

Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crush-hat, according to his wont, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance; so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval, and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Wasn’t it simply what had been written in the Prince’s own face BENEATH what he was saying?–didn’t it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn’t, in fine, the pledge that they would “manage in their own way” the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband’s tone somehow fitted Amerigo’s look–the one that had, for her, so strangely, peeped, from behind, over the shoulder of the one in front. She had not then read it–but wasn’t she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn’t to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her “Well, what’s the matter?” she also took time to remind herself that she had decided she couldn’t be frightened. The “matter”?–why, it was sufficiently the matter, with all this, that she felt a little sick. For it was not the Prince that she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had, at the most, perhaps postulated–it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with. Therefore if HE had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back and fairly drew her forth; after which, on the pavement, under the street-lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something grave–their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost resembled a return from a funeral– unless indeed it resembled more the hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home for but to bury, as decently as possible, her mistake?

XVII

It appeared thus that they might enjoy together extraordinary freedom, the two friends, from the moment they should understand their position aright. With the Prince himself, from an early stage, not unnaturally, Charlotte had made a great point of their so understanding it; she had found frequent occasion to describe to him this necessity, and, her resignation tempered, or her intelligence at least quickened, by irrepressible irony, she applied at different times different names to the propriety of their case. The wonderful thing was that her sense of propriety had been, from the first, especially alive about it. There were hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the commonest tact–as if this principle alone would suffice to light their way; there were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs. She talked now as if it were indicated, at every turn, by finger-posts of almost ridiculous prominence; she talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar; and she even, on occasion, delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation was unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. “‘Do’?” she once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly, occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like strange order had been prescribed in his own case. “Isn’t the immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that we have to ‘do’ nothing in life at all?–nothing except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one’s not being more of a fool than one can help. That’s all–but that’s as true for one time as for another. There has been plenty of ‘doing,’ and there will doubtless be plenty still; but it’s all theirs, every inch of it; it’s all a matter of what they’ve done TO us.” And she showed how the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as everything came, and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair: no more extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims than this of forcing them against their will into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.

She was to remember not a little, meanwhile, the particular prolonged silent look with which the Prince had met her allusion to these primary efforts at escape. She was inwardly to dwell on the element of the unuttered that her tone had caused to play up into his irresistible eyes; and this because she considered with pride and joy that she had, on the spot, disposed of the doubt, the question, the challenge, or whatever else might have been, that such a look could convey. He had been sufficiently off his guard to show some little wonder as to their having plotted so very hard against their destiny, and she knew well enough, of course, what, in this connection, was at the bottom of his thought, and what would have sounded out more or less if he had not happily saved himself from words. All men were brutes enough to catch when they might at such chances for dissent–for all the good it really did them; but the Prince’s distinction was in being one of the few who could check himself before acting on the impulse. This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy. If her friend had blurted or bungled he would have said, in his simplicity, “Did we do ‘everything to avoid’ it when we faced your remarkable marriage?”–quite handsomely of course using the plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after Mr. Verver had despatched to Rome the news of their engagement. That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them– an acceptance quite other than perfunctory–she had never destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place–from which, very privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over. “A la guerre comme a la guerre then”–it had been couched in the French tongue. “We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own.” The message had remained ambiguous; she had read it in more lights than one; it might mean that even without her his career was up-hill work for him, a daily fighting-matter on behalf of a good appearance, and that thus, if they were to become neighbours again, the event would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean on the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself had not asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an inquiry, everything implied, was beneath him–just as it was beneath herself to mention to him, uninvited, that she had instantly offered, and in perfect honesty, to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would, in all probability, straightway have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact, for the moment, hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver’s delicacy (as she supposed they must call it); and that her position, in the matter of responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight.

For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured allowance, had originally much helped him–helped him in the sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of which it was just this accessory element that seemed, at present, with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else, separations, delays and intervals; but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had, on the whole, expected; less, strangely, for the state of being married even as he was married. And there was a logic in the matter, he knew; a logic that but gave this truth a sort of solidity of evidence. Mr. Verver, decidedly, helped him with it–with his wedded condition; helped him really so much that it made all the difference. In the degree in which he rendered it the service on Mr. Verver’s part was remarkable–as indeed what service, from the first of their meeting, had not been? He was living, he had been living these four or five years, on Mr. Verver’s services: a truth scarcely less plain if he dealt with them, for appreciation, one by one, than if he poured them all together into the general pot of his gratitude and let the thing simmer to a nourishing broth. To the latter way with them he was undoubtedly most disposed; yet he would even thus, on occasion, pick out a piece to taste on its own merits. Wondrous at such hours could seem the savour of the particular “treat,” at his father-in-law’s expense, that he more and more struck himself as enjoying. He had needed months and months to arrive at a full appreciation–he couldn’t originally have given offhand a name to his deepest obligation; but by the time the name had flowered in his mind he was practically living at the ease guaranteed him. Mr. Verver then, in a word, took care of his relation to Maggie, as he took care, and apparently always would, of everything else. He relieved him of all anxiety about his married life in the same manner in which he relieved him on the score of his bank-account. And as he performed the latter office by communicating with the bankers, so the former sprang as directly from his good understanding with his daughter. This understanding had, wonderfully–THAT was in high evidence–the same deep intimacy as the commercial, the financial association founded, far down, on a community of interest. And the correspondence, for the Prince, carried itself out in identities of character the vision of which, fortunately, rather tended to amuse than to–as might have happened–irritate him. Those people–and his free synthesis lumped together capitalists and bankers, retired men of business, illustrious collectors, American fathers-in-law, American fathers, little American daughters, little American wives–those people were of the same large lucky group, as one might say; they were all, at least, of the same general species and had the same general instincts; they hung together, they passed each other the word, they spoke each other’s language, they did each other “turns.” In this last connection it of course came up for our young man at a given moment that Maggie’s relation with HIM was also, on the perceived basis, taken care of. Which was in fact the real upshot of the matter. It was a “funny” situation–that is it was funny just as it stood. Their married life was in question, but the solution was, not less strikingly, before them. It was all right for himself, because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie’s comfort; and it was all right for Maggie, because he worked it so for her husband’s.

The fact that time, however, was not, as we have said, wholly on the Prince’s side might have shown for particularly true one dark day on which, by an odd but not unprecedented chance, the reflections just noted offered themselves as his main recreation. They alone, it appeared, had been appointed to fill the hours for him, and even to fill the great square house in Portland Place, where the scale of one of the smaller saloons fitted them but loosely. He had looked into this room on the chance that he might find the Princess at tea; but though the fireside service of the repast was shiningly present the mistress of the table was not, and he had waited for her, if waiting it could be called, while he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. He could have named to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at this moment, and her not coming in, as the half-hour elapsed, became in fact quite positively, however perversely, the circumstance that kept him on the spot. Just there, he might have been feeling, just there he could best take his note. This observation was certainly by itself meagre amusement for a dreary little crisis; but his walk to and fro, and in particular his repeated pause at one of the high front windows, gave each of the ebbing minutes, none the less, after a time, a little more of the quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. These throbs scarce expressed, however, the impatience of desire, any more than they stood for sharp disappointment: the series together resembled perhaps more than anything else those fine waves of clearness through which, for a watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles into rosy day. The illumination indeed was all for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of thought; the material outlook was all the while a different matter. The March afternoon, judged at the window, had blundered back into autumn; it had been raining for hours, and the colour of the rain, the colour of the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses, of life altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable dirty brown. There was at first even, for the young man, no faint flush in the fact of the direction taken, while he happened to look out, by a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab which, awkwardly deflecting from the middle course, at the apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the left-hand pavement and so at last, under further instructions, floundered to a full stop before the Prince’s windows. The person within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to be a lady who left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no umbrella, quickly crossed the wet interval that separated her from the house. She but flitted and disappeared; yet the Prince, from his standpoint, had had time to recognise her, and the recognition kept him for some minutes motionless.

Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, while he stood waiting, a singular intensity–though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had NOT come, or had come only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below that the Princess had not returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing a word on a card. He should see, at any rate; and meanwhile, controlling himself, would do nothing. This thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into sight while the superficial conditions were so against her was a harmony with conditions that were far from superficial and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her presence. The value deepened strangely, moreover, with the rigour of his own attitude–with the fact too that, listening hard, he neither heard the house-door close again nor saw her go back to her cab; and it had risen to a climax by the time he had become aware, with his quickened sense, that she had followed the butler up to the landing from which his room opened. If anything could further then have added to it, the renewed pause outside, as if she had said to the man “Wait a moment!” would have constituted this touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle and had then busied himself, all deliberately, with the fire, she made it easy for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and to meet her, provisionally, on the question of Maggie. While the butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see and Maggie that–in spite of this attendant’s high blankness on the subject of all possibilities on that lady’s part–she would cheerfully, by the fire, wait for. As soon as they were alone together, however, she mounted, as with the whizz and the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact, saying straight out, as she stood and looked at him: “What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do?”

It was as if he then knew, on the spot, why he had been feeling, for hours, as he had felt–as if he in fact knew, within the minute, things he had not known even while she was panting, as from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less, that she knew still more than he–in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternative–she could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions– opened out, altogether, with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He couldn’t have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion, in Rome, from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence–the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter– of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat’s and the frock’s own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had not yet done: it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently THERE, to be wounded or shocked.

What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he had, by a single turn of the wrist of fate–“led up” to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed–been placed face to face in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was–into which he had lived, quite intimately, by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour–that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. On that morning; in the Park there had been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence. The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone–even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her ricketty “growler” and the conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what had become of her carriage and why, above all, she was not using it in such weather.

“It’s just because of the weather,” she explained. “It’s my little idea. It makes me feel as I used to–when I could do as I liked.”

XVIII

This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. “But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?”

“It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It’s the charm, at any rate,” she said from her place at the fire, “of trying again the old feelings. They come back–they come back. Everything,” she went on, “comes back. Besides,” she wound up, “you know for yourself.”

He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. “Ah, I haven’t your courage. Moreover,” he laughed, “it seems to me that, so far as that goes, I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully want your tea,” he quickly added; “so let me give you a good stiff cup.”

He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that, while she talked, he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate– in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question, as yet, of their seeing their way together: to which indeed, exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. “It’s not that you haven’t my courage,” Charlotte said, “but that you haven’t, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all,” she added, “that you haven’t even my intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you’ve given me more proof.” And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. “You knew, besides, you knew to-day, I would come. And if you knew that you know everything.” So she pursued, and if he didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal–not exactly blessed by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. “Above all,” she said, “there has been the personal romance of it.”

“Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.”

“Oh, it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I AM braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I don’t,” she repeated.

“It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,” he protested, “that takes courage.”

“Passive then–not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the town–isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.” After which, as if breaking off, “And you, have you never been out?” she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. “What should I have gone out for?”

“Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you’re wonderful, all of YOU–you know how to live. We’re clumsy brutes, we other’s, beside you–we must always be ‘doing’ something. However,” Charlotte pursued, “if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me–which I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t want; and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you on. That’s really what I can at last do. You can’t not know at least, on such a day as this–you can’t not know,” she said, “where you are.” She waited as for him either to grant that he knew or to pretend that he didn’t; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there. So, for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. “There it all is– extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven’t we therefore to take things as we find them?” She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one, as well, he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea, he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have; and then, on her “Nothing, thanks,” returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. “What else can we do, what in all the world else?”

He took them up, however, no more than at first. “Where then have you been?” he asked as from mere interest in her adventure.

“Everywhere I could think of–except to see people. I didn’t want people–I wanted too much to think. But I’ve been back at intervals–three times; and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy–it’s very amusing; I shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he has ever seen. I’ve been, my dear,” she went on, “to the British Museum–which, you know, I always adore. And I’ve been to the National Gallery, and to a dozen old booksellers’, coming across treasures, and I’ve lunched, on some strange nastiness, at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it was too far–my old man urged that; and I would have gone to the Zoo if it hadn’t been too wet–which he also begged me to observe. But you wouldn’t believe–I did put in St. Paul’s. Such days,” she wound up, “are expensive; for, besides the cab, I’ve bought quantities of books.” She immediately passed, at any rate, to another point: “I can’t help wondering when you must last have laid eyes on them.” And then as it had apparently for her companion an effect of abruptness: “Maggie, I mean, and the child. For I suppose you know he’s with her.”

“Oh yes, I know he’s with her. I saw them this morning.”

“And did they then announce their programme?”

“She told me she was taking him, as usual, da nonno.”

“And for the whole day?”

He hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly shifted.

“She didn’t say. And I didn’t ask.”

“Well,” she went on, “it can’t have been later than half-past ten–I mean when you saw them. They had got to Eaton Square before eleven. You know we don’t formally breakfast, Adam and I; we have tea in our rooms–at least I have; but luncheon is early, and I saw my husband, this morning, by twelve; he was showing the child a picture-book. Maggie had been there with them, had left them settled together. Then she had gone out–taking the carriage for something he had been intending but that she offered to do instead.”

The Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest.

“Taking, you mean, YOUR carriage?”

“I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not a question,” she smiled, “of a carriage the more or the less. It’s not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It’s so beautiful,” she said, “that it’s not a question of anything vulgar or horrid.” Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he fell in. “I went out–I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important. It has BEEN–it IS important. I know as I haven’t known before the way they feel. I couldn’t in any other way have made so sure of it.”

“They feel a confidence,” the Prince observed.

He had indeed said it for her. “They feel a confidence.” And she proceeded, with lucidity, to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return–for curiosity, and even really a little from anxiety–to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key, rarely used: it had always irritated Adam–one of the few things that did–to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home, in the small hours, after parties. “So I had but to slip in, each time, with my cab at the door, and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went–without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose,” she asked, “becomes of one?–not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn’t matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maitresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They must even in their odd way,” she declared, “have SOME idea.”

“Oh, they’ve a great deal of idea,” said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. “They think so much of us. They think in particular so much of you.”

“Ah, don’t put it all on ‘me’!” she smiled.

But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place. “It’s a matter of your known character.”

“Ah, thank you for ‘known’!” she still smiled.

“It’s a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It’s a matter of what those things have done for you in the world–I mean in THIS world and this place. You’re a Personage for them–and Personages do go and come.”

“Oh no, my dear; there you’re quite wrong.” And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. “That’s exactly what Personages don’t do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven’t latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in growlers it makes a greater noise still. It’s you, caro mio,” she said, “who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.”

“Ah,” he in turn protested, “don’t put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home,” he added, “shall you say that you’ve been doing?”

“I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.”

“All day?”

“Yes–all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything,” she went on, “without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you?–just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.”

He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out: “How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?” And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect: “They would have done the same for one of yours.”

“Ah, if I could have had one–! I hoped and I believed,” said Charlotte, “that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck–that it might have been. I’m sure he hoped and intended so. It’s not, at any rate,” she went on, “my fault. There it is.” She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete. “And now I’m too sure. It will never be.”

He waited for a moment. “Never?”

“Never.” They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of distinctness. “It would probably have been better,” Charlotte added. “But things turn out–! And it leaves us”–she made the point–“more alone.”

He seemed to wonder. “It leaves you more alone.”

“Oh,” she again returned, “don’t put it all on me! Maggie would have given herself to his child, I’m sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine,” she explained–“it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them–to keep our sposi apart.” She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but, as he seemed to take it, in spite of this, for important, she then spoke gravely enough. “It’s as strange as you like, but we’re immensely alone.” He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. “What will you say,” she meanwhile asked, “that you’ve been doing?” This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. “I mean when she comes in–for I suppose she WILL, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing.”

Well, he thought again. “Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven’t.”

“Ah, WHAT haven’t you had?–what aren’t you having?”

Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and he still took it, before he answered, from her eyes. “We must at least then, not to be absurd together, do the same thing. We must act, it would really seem, in concert.”

“It would really seem!” Her eyebrows, her shoulders went up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. “It’s all in the world I pretend. We must act in concert. Heaven knows,” she said, “THEY do!”

So it was that he evidently saw and that, by his admission, the case, could fairly be put. But what he evidently saw appeared to come over him, at the same time, as too much for him, so that he fell back suddenly to ground where she was not awaiting him. “The difficulty is, and will always be, that I don’t understand them. I didn’t at first, but I thought I should learn to. That was what I hoped, and it appeared then that Fanny Assingham might help me.”

“Oh, Fanny Assingham!” said Charlotte Verver.

He stared a moment at her tone. “She would do anything for us.”

To which Charlotte at first said nothing–as if from the sense of too much. Then, indulgently enough, she shook her head. “We’re beyond her.”

He thought a moment–as of where this placed them. “She’d do anything then for THEM.”

“Well, so would we–so that doesn’t help us. She has broken down. She doesn’t understand us. And really, my dear,” Charlotte added, “Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.”

He wondered again. “Unless as taking care of THEM.”

“Ah,” Charlotte instantly said, “isn’t it for us, only, to do that?” She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. “I think we want no one’s aid.”

She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name, and could act on, was something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the glory of which–as it almost might be called–what he gave her back had the value of what she had, given him. “They’re extraordinarily happy.”

Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. “Beatifically.”

“That’s the great thing,” he went on; “so that it doesn’t matter, really, that one doesn’t understand. Besides, you do–enough.”

“I understand my husband perhaps,” she after an instant conceded. “I don’t understand your wife.”

“You’re of the same race, at any rate–more or less; of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I’ve gone on trying to see if I haven’t some of these things too–I, on my side, have more and more failed. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can’t help seeing it–I’m decidedly too different.”

“Yet you’re not”–Charlotte made the important point–“too different from ME.”

“I don’t know–as we’re not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were,” he said, “you WOULD find some abyss of divergence.”

“Since it depends on that then,” she smiled, “I’m safe–as you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion to feel, and even to remark, they’re very, very simple. That makes,” she added, “a difficulty for belief; but when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty for action. I HAVE at last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I’m not afraid.”

He wondered a moment. “Not afraid of what?”

“Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one’s idea of their difference. For that idea,” Charlotte developed, “positively makes one so tender.”

“Ah, but rather!”

“Well then, there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s skin–I can’t, as I say. It’s not my fit–I shouldn’t be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything–to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,” she went on, “I think I’m still more so for my husband. HE’S in truth of a sweet simplicity–!”

The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr. Verver. “Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them–and how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious care–“

“Of every hour, literally,” said Charlotte. She could rise to the highest measure of the facts. “And for which we must trust each other–!”

“Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,” the Prince hastened to add, “we can.” With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. “It’s all too wonderful.”

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beautiful.”

And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. “It’s sacred,” he said at last.

“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.

XIX

He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter–the “now” he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour, so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open to interpretation. It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation, “broken down,” the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses–the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit?–which was the last thing he had expected of her and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last “beyond” her; whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs. Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought, at his ease, of the way persons who were capable really entertained–or at least with any refinement–the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty, if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself; to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he was married–that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy–to call worthy–of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humourously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare, insidiously, the cup. These were the services that, by all romantic tradition, were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse himself with saying–so far as the amusement went–that they were what he had once for all turned his back on.

Fanny was meanwhile frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at tea-time, during the same period, in Portland Place; though they had little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs. Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; her latest view of her utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent field. It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte’s aid, so very considerably lived into it–it would have been all indescribably remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed of course on finding her so absent from her home–just as this particular phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind, best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons, “shy” of Portland Place itself–this was appreciable; so that she might well, after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte’s appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came to this) of the head of that house. There was always, to cover all ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of Mrs. Verver’s day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation in charge of the “social relations” of the family, literally of those of the two households; as to her genius for representing which in the great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more accumulated. It had been established in the two households at an early stage, and with the highest good-humour, that Charlotte was a, was THE, “social success,” whereas the Princess, though kind, though punctilious, though charming, though in fact the dearest little creature in the world and the Princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly never be, and might as well, practically, give it up: whether through being above it or below it, too much outside of it or too much lost in it, too unequipped or too indisposed, didn’t especially matter. What sufficed was that the whole thing, call it appetite or call it patience, the act of representation at large and the daily business of intercourse, fell in with Charlotte’s tested facility and, not much less visibly, with her accommodating, her generous, view of her domestic use. She had come, frankly, into the connection, to do and to be what she could, “no questions asked,” and she had taken over, accordingly, as it stood, and in the finest practical spirit, the burden of a visiting-list that Maggie, originally, left to herself, and left even more to the Principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand.

She had in a word not only mounted, cheerfully, the London treadmill–she had handsomely professed herself, for the further comfort of the three others, sustained in the effort by a “frivolous side,” if that were not too harsh a name for a pleasant constitutional curiosity. There were possibilities of dulness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters-of-an-hour that turned up like false pieces in a debased currency, of which she made, on principle, very nearly as light as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The Prince had, on this score, paid her his compliment soon after her return from her wedding-tour in America, where, by all accounts, she had wondrously borne the brunt; facing brightly, at her husband’s side, everything that came up–and what had come, often, was beyond words: just as, precisely, with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her husband’s son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus it had been, in short, that Charlotte could, for her friend’s appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions from which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of his own. “What could be more simple than one’s going through with everything,” she had asked, “when it’s so plain a part of one’s contract? I’ve got so much, by my marriage”–for she had never for a moment concealed from him how “much” she had felt it and was finding it “that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I’m not a brute,” she had wound up, “you shall see me as I AM!” Which was therefore as he had seen her–dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all the while, contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her husband’s daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something more than this–it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in–on the crudest expression of it–to do the “worldly” for them, and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it, moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt, quite equally provide for–that would be, to balance, just in a manner Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognise it.

Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually recognising it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the Prince’s breast these others, these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently–considering, in especial, his fuller resources in that line–while he worked out–to the last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to seek Fanny out in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and ultimate; and it consorted with common prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case, moreover, was that the “world,” by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be added, did, on occasion, wake up to opportunity and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations–one of which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect of disturbing a little our young man’s measure of his margin. Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte’s own judgment was, always, that they were ideally free–the proof of which would always be, she maintained, that everyone they feared they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive, wreathed with smiles, on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in smiles, all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck Amerigo as being; they were, frankly, touching occasions to him, marked, in the great London bousculade, with a small, still grace of their own, an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came, everybody rushed; but all succumbed to the soft influence, and the brutality of mere multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put off, at the foot of the fine staircase, with the overcoats and shawls. The entertainment offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not insistently incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note of this almost Arcadian optimism: a large, bright, dull, murmurous, mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince knew, Maggie’s anxiety had conferred with Charlotte’s ingenuity and both had supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr. Verver’s solvency.

The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the foot of the social ladder, and with the Colonel’s wife, in spite of her humility of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because, in the first place, she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and the standard of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the second, the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially, well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It was not indistinguishable to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself–and this, he knew, in spite of any desire she entertained–to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew, as well, the other things of which her appearance was at any time–and in Eaton Square especially–made up: her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid, and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, in the first flushed days, after their engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally–for it was analogy, somehow, more than identity–to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in miniature. A light, however, broke for him in season, and when once it had done so it made him more than ever aware of Mrs. Verver’s vaguely, yet quite exquisitely, contingent participation–a mere hinted or tendered discretion; in short of Mrs. Verver’s indescribable, unfathomable relation to the scene. Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser presence, her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame and that had in fact kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father’s party, and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the importance of his importance; so that sympathy created for her a sort of visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled with filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression, movement, tone. It was all unmistakable, and as pretty as possible, if one would, and even as funny; but it put the pair so together, as undivided by the marriage of each, that the Princess il n’y avait pas a dire–might sit where she liked: she would still, always, in that house, be irremediably Maggie Verver. The Prince found himself on this occasion so beset with that perception that its natural complement for him would really have been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of the same impression in the recorded cases of his having dined with his daughter.

This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would have been easily arrested; for it was at present to come over Amerigo as never before that his remarkable father-in-law was the man in the world least equipped with different appearances for different hours. He was simple, he was a revelation of simplicity, and that was the end of him so far as he consisted of an appearance at all–a question that might verily, for a weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man, who was taking his pleasure to-night, it will be seen, in sundry occult ways, it amused him to feel how everything else the master of the house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and amiabilities amplified by the social legend, depended, for conveying the effect of quantity, on no personal “equation,” no mere measurable medium. Quantity was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver’s estimable quality was almost wholly in that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and clearbrowed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed without defiance; his shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high, his complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not covered; in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of his table, so nearly like a little boy shyly entertaining in virtue of some imposed rank, that he COULD only be one of the powers, the representative of a force–quite as an infant king is the representative of a dynasty. In this generalised view of his father-in-law, intensified to-night but always operative, Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. The refuge, after the reunion of the two households in England, had more and more offered itself as the substitute for communities, from man to man, that, by his original calculation, might have become possible, but that had not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family eyes across the table, met them afterwards in the music-room, but only to read in them still what he had learned to read during his first months, the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of apprehension in which the terms and conditions were finally fixed and absolute. This directed regard rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated, and was, to the Prince’s fancy, much of the same order as any glance directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a cheque received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a banker. It made sure of the amount–and just so, from time to time, the amount of the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all, had not fixed it–the “figure” was a conception all of Mr. Verver’s own. Certainly, however, everything must be kept up to it; never so much as to-night had the Prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable, as these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was impossible that he should not now and again meet Charlotte’s eyes, as it was also visible that she too now and again met her husband’s. For her as well, in all his pulses, he felt the conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them together, through the vain show of their separation, made the two other faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of “care,” would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound.

XX

The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste. This was the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham’s hand after dinner, while the clustered quartette kept their ranged companions, in the music-room, moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved–by the genius of Brahms–beyond what she could bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated away, at the young man’s side, to such a distance as permitted them to converse without the effect of disdain. It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms–it was their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring–in a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness– these independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly but distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain– which had introduced, in turn, a slight awkwardness. “Do you know that they’re not, after all, going to Matcham; so that, if they don’t–if, at least, Maggie doesn’t–you won’t, I suppose, go by yourself?” It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined. He had paid, first and last, many an English country visit; he had learned, even from of old, to do the English things, and to do them, all sufficiently, in the English way; if he didn’t always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to an appearance, as the good people who had, in the night of time, unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised them; yet, with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical, life; the determined need, which apparently all participant, of returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front–in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing, of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray; it met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression. Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own people–or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else–that he moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous whole.

“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket. The Prince’s shining star may, no doubt, having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of sight– amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather momentously occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old friend: his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on–and he could scarce have said why–a sharpness of importance: she had never lied to him before–if only because it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the question of what he would do–by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do– in that event of Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying had become marked in her. Betrayed by the solicitude of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a view, she had been obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly, a reason for her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he had on the spot, in his friendliness, invented one for her use, presenting it to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up, to hand back to her, a dropped flower. “You ask if I’m likely also to back out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel decide?”–he had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting her to assent, though not having had his impression, from any indication offered him by Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question for the large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe themselves on the golden roll; an exertion of a sort that, to do her justice, he had never before observed Fanny to make. This last passage of the chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she would.

Once launched, himself, at any rate, as he had been directed by all the terms of the intercourse between Portland Place and Eaton Square, once steeped, at Matcham, in the enjoyment of a splendid hospitality, he found everything, for his interpretation, for his convenience, fall easily enough into place; and all the more that Mrs. Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with. The great house was full of people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible propinquity, and no appearance, of course, was less to be cultivated than that of his having sought an opportunity to foregather with his friend at a safe distance from their respective sposi. There was a happy boldness, at the best, in their mingling thus, each unaccompanied, in the same sustained sociability–just exactly a touch of that eccentricity of associated freedom which sat so lightly on the imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as much as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should, at such a rate, go about together–though, on the other hand, this consideration drew relief from the fact that, in their high conditions and with the easy tradition, the almost inspiring allowances, of the house in question, no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced anything more than funny. Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider–looking as it did well over the heads of all lower growths; and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated party to the general alliance. What anyone “thought” of anyone else–above all of anyone else with anyone else–was a matter incurring in these lulls so little awkward formulation that hovering judgment, the spirit with the scales, might perfectly have been imaged there as some rather snubbed and subdued, but quite trained and tactful poor relation, of equal, of the properest, lineage, only of aspect a little dingy, doubtless from too limited a change of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence, never betrayed by a rattle of her rusty machine, a room in the attic and a plate at the side-table were decently usual. It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again, to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn’t bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. That was all right, the noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess.

What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand–to that the thing came back–was above all for courage and good-humour; and the value of this as a general assurance– that is for seeing one through at the worst–had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns–which was much to the point–in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course–a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself. It wasn’t that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they said, to “happen”; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of “What indeed would THEY have made of it?” “They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping–so far as they ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of– whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it. They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio.

The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms–terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square–under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation–deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous, but that one couldn’t yet help, as for instance when one’s wife chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here, however, was the difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual–yet to which, none the less, it would be too absurd that he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or incapable–this WAS a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one’s own handling. What was supremely grotesque, in fact, was the essential opposition of theories–as if a galantuomo, as HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything BUT blush to “go about” at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it–also as a man of the world–all merciful justice; but, assuredly, none the less, there was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Wasn’t this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an exquisite sense of complicity.

XXI

He found himself therefore saying, with gaiety, even to Fanny Assingham, for their common, concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place: “What WOULD our cari sposi have made of it here? what would they, you know, really?”–which overflow would have been reckless if, already, and surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying: “Ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for you?”–but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and cheer. He had his view, as well–or at least a partial one–of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver’s last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being–as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself–the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s–these matters and others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst, be picturesque–for she habitually spoke of herself as “local” to Sloane Street whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement, in her, of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn’t really watching him–ground for which would have been too terribly grave–she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: SO she might, precisely, mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take–the Prince could see it all: it wasn’t a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn’t even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips, that she now knew her–he didn’t then say “Ah, see what you’ve done: isn’t it rather your own fault?” He behaved differently altogether: eminently distinguished himself–for she told him she had never seen him so universally distinguished–he yet distinguished her in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for “bridge” and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his “niceness” to her–she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes–had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration.

“She understands,” he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs. Verver–“she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it. She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can’t say in so many words ‘Don’t think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.’ I don’t get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it. But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that she’s–well,” the Prince wound up, “what you may call practically all right.” Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn’t call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit’s end was she, for once, clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on, be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall then was empty, before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemaids were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end, where they might imitate, with art, the unpremeditated. Above all, here, for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman’s tone had even now a certain dryness. “It’s very good of her, my dear, to trust us. But what else can she do?”

“Why, whatever people do when they don’t trust. Let one see they don’t.”

“But let whom see?”

“Well, let ME, say, to begin with.”

“And should you mind that?”

He had a slight show of surprise. “Shouldn’t you?”

“Her letting you see? No,” said Charlotte; “the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don’t look out, may let HER see.” To which she added: “You may let her see, you know, that you’re afraid.”

“I’m only afraid of you, a little, at moments,” he presently returned. “But I shan’t let Fanny see that.”

It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Assingham’s vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done. “What in the world can she do against us? There’s not a word that she can breathe. She’s helpless; she can’t speak; she would be herself the first to be dished by it.” And then as he seemed slow to follow: “It all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything, from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage.”

The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. “Mayn’t she also be said, a good deal, to have made yours? That was intended, I think, wasn’t it? for a kind of rectification.”

Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still. “I don’t mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I’m not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I’m speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day. She can’t go to them and say ‘It’s very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.'”

He took it in still, with his long look at her. “All the more that she wasn’t. She was right. Everything’s right,” he went on, “and everything will stay so.”

“Then that’s all I say.”

But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. “We’re happy, and they’re happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?”

“Ah, my dear,” said Charlotte, “it’s not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she’s FIXED, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It’s you who have seemed haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.” And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile. “We ARE prepared–for anything, for everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She’s condemned to consistency; she’s doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore,” Mrs. Verver gently laughed, “she has the chance of her life!”

“So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere?–may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?”

The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. “You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel, at any rate, that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It’s enough for me that she’ll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.” And Charlotte’s face, with these words–to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them– fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption–so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn’t heretofore by a hair’s breadth deviated. “If it didn’t sound so vulgar I should say that we’re–fatally, as it were–SAFE. Pardon the low expression–since it’s what we happen to be. We’re so because they are. And they’re so because they can’t be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. That’s the way she’s inevitably WITH us,” said Charlotte over her smile. “We hang, essentially, together.”

Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. “Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together.”

His friend had a shrug–a shrug that had a grace. “Cosa volete?” The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. “Ah, beyond doubt, it’s a case.”

He stood looking at her. “It’s a case. There can’t,” he said, “have been many.”

“Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,” she smiled, “I confess I should like to think. Only ours.”

“Only ours–most probably. Speriamo.” To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added: “Poor Fanny!” But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. Something in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air. “Poor, poor Fanny!”

It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham breaking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of the social side of the process of repatriation with due presence of mind. It was impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with the Assinghams; it was impossible, for the same reasons, that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right tone for disposing of his elder friend’s suggestion, an assumption in fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs. Verver had been, precisely, a part of Mrs. Assingham’s mildness, and nothing could better have characterised her sense for social shades than her easy perception that the gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton Square might now confess, quite without indiscretion, to simultaneity of movement. She had made, for the four days, no direct appeal to the latter personage, but the Prince was accidental witness of her taking a fresh start at the moment the company were about to scatter for the last night of their stay. There had been, at this climax, the usual preparatory talk about hours and combinations, in the midst of which poor Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said “You and the Prince, love,”–quite, apparently, without blinking; she took for granted their public withdrawal together; she remarked that she and Bob were alike ready, in the interest of sociability, to take any train that would make them all one party. “I feel really as if, all this time, I had seen nothing of you”–that gave an added grace to the candour of the dear thing’s approach. But just then it was, on the other hand, that the young man found himself borrow most effectively the secret of the right tone for doing as he preferred. His preference had, during the evening, not failed of occasion to press him with mute insistences; practically without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy, it had arrived at a felt identity with Charlotte’s own. She spoke all for their friend while she answered their friend’s question, but she none the less signalled to him as definitely as if she had fluttered a white handkerchief from a window. “It’s awfully sweet of you, darling–our going together would be charming. But you mustn’t mind us–you must suit yourselves we’ve settled, Amerigo and I, to stay over till after luncheon.”

Amerigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned straight away, so as not to be instantly appealed to; and for the very emotion of the wonder, furthermore, of what divination may achieve when winged by a community of passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had been keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered it simply as a consequence of their deepening unexpressed need of each other and without the passing between them of a word. He hadn’t, God knew, to take it from her–he was too conscious of what he wanted; but the lesson for him was in the straight clear tone that Charlotte could thus distil, in the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no touch for plausibility, that she wasn’t strictly obliged to add, and in the truly superior way in which women, so situated, express and distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Assingham quite adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the smallest that would serve, and she had, above all, thrown off, for his stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun. The measure of EVERYTHING, to all his sense, at these moments, was in it–the measure especially of the thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself–the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. It had already told them, with an hourly voice, that it had a meaning–a meaning that their associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through the sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day, and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive taste of it; yet it was all, none the less, as if their response had remained below their fortune. How to bring it, by some brave, free lift, up to the same height was the idea with which, behind and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of which, as in that of the sun-chequered greenwood of romance, his spirit thus, at the opening of a vista, met hers. They were already, from that moment, so hand-in-hand in the place that he found himself making use, five minutes later, of exactly the same tone as Charlotte’s for telling Mrs. Assingham that he was likewise, in the matter of the return to London, sorry for what mightn’t be.

This had become, of a sudden, the simplest thing in the world– the sense of which moreover seemed really to amount to a portent that he should feel, forevermore, on the general head, conveniently at his ease with her. He went in fact a step further than Charlotte–put the latter forward as creating his necessity. She was staying over luncheon to oblige their hostess–as a consequence of which he must also stay to see her decently home. He must deliver her safe and sound, he felt, in Eaton Square.